Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  Mavrides pointed his sidearm at the man’s left eye and the shopkeeper froze.

  “What’s the threat?” he snarled. “How are they coming for us?”

  “I don’t know!” the man wailed. “I don’t know!”

  Mavrides lowered the weapon, aiming it at the younger daughter.

  “Private Mavrides!” Kate snapped. “That’s enough!”

  His head swiveled toward her. The Ace of Spades shone starkly white on his gleaming chrome-hued forehead.

  “We can’t let them—“ Mavrides began.

  “Stow your weapon, Private,” she said.

  Travaglini shifted slightly, his stance making it clear he would back her up with bullets if necessary. Kate glanced at Hawkins, whose bot eyes were narrowed with dark contemplation.

  “Zack, you’re an inch from insubordination,” Hawkins warned.

  “He’s a mile across that line,” Travaglini muttered.

  Hawkins kept his focus on Mavrides. “This guy doesn’t know anything. If he did, he’d have said.”

  Mavrides hesitated a moment, then took a step back and lowered his gun, but he did not put it away.

  “Private channel, Sergeant Morello,” Kate said, gesturing for the others to be silent as she opened a commlink. As before, she heard static on the line.

  “Morello,” the sergeant answered, his voice crackling.

  “Sarge, it’s Wade. Something’s going down. We’ve got a shopkeeper here who’s more spooked than I am. No details, but they were warned to keep their heads down.”

  “You thinking Bot Killers?” Morello asked.

  Kate glanced Travaglini and the others, at the shopkeeper’s daughters, and then at the man himself—at the fear in his eyes.

  “I don’t know, Sarge,” she said. “Maybe something bigger.”

  ~4~

  Hanif Khan cradled his Dragonov sniper rifle, enjoying the heat that the morning sun had baked into the weapon’s stock and barrel, but in his heart he wished for a knife. He had been killing since the age of twelve and had always preferred a blade to a bullet. A knife made murder intimate and real, brought the full weight of the deed’s ugliness upon the killer, which he believed it ought to be. Guns were impersonal. You couldn’t feel the flesh give way, the scrape of metal on bone, could not feel the heat or smell the copper tang of the first spray of blood. Killing had sometimes broken Hanif Khan’s heart and other times had given him satisfaction, even a sense of triumph, but it had never felt insignificant to him.

  Until the robots.

  There could be no murder with the man-shaped drones, the things the American army called Remote Infantry and the western media called Tin Men and the rest of the world just called robots. They weren’t as simple as that, of course. They were life-sized marionettes, really, murderous puppets whose strings were invisible lines of data bounced off satellites and beamed into the complex operating systems of the most sophisticated automatons ever built.

  Even the sharpest knife could do little more than scrape the shell of one of the American drone soldiers. The destruction of one required powerful, targeted explosives, but their sensors had a ninety-one percent success rate at spotting IEDs and grenades had to be right in their laps to do significant damage. Since the first appearance of the Tin Men, rocket launchers had made the most sense, but their explosives had rarely been powerful enough to do more than temporarily disable the robots. Those old launchers had been good for nothing but keeping the Americans nervous, letting them know that resistance remained.

  Today a new breed of rocket launcher would debut, designed specifically for assault on the Tin Men. But just as he preferred a knife to a gun, Hanif Khan had little interest in explosives and technology as a means of killing. Stopping a robot with a rifle was far more difficult, requiring at least two but often three armor-piercing bullets to strike the same square-inch of the drone’s outer shell. There were only two targets on the drone’s carapace weak enough to allow a third bullet to pass through, strike the robot’s power core, and cause it to explode from within. The upper torso of the robot’s external shell consisted of two pieces—the chassis, or back frame, and the chest plate. Three bullets striking the same point on either side—on the seam that connected chassis and chest plate, halfway between armpit and hip—would destroy one of the Tin Men.

  Very few people were skilled enough with a rifle to put three bullets in the same square inch of a moving target—even one staggered by the first shot. Hanif Khan had the ability and he had the desire. He had spent years plotting against the arrogance of the Americans from afar, forever haunted by the knowledge that even if he destroyed a thousand robot soldiers it would be nothing more than a nuisance to the enemy, a financial irritation. Broken toys were not casualties, and so destroying Tin Men gave him no satisfaction. The American people were overjoyed that they could fulfill their pompous mission of policing the world without risking the lives of their sons and daughters. They were willing to increase the military’s budget as long as the price in blood went down, and a handful of America’s allies had begun to share the financial burden of this tyranny in order to reap the benefits of forced world peace.

  It would never end, Khan knew. Not if the Americans had a choice in the matter.

  Today was about taking that choice away from them.

  Once he had been a warlord in his native Afghanistan, the most powerful man in Kunar Province, earning millions of dollars a year by using his private army to aid the American government in its efforts to suppress the Taliban, running secret operations over the border with Pakistan. Until the Pakistani government fell into radical hands and began regular raids into his province and Khan stopped worrying about whether his attacks on the Pakistanis were done in secret.

  The US Remote Infantry were brand new in those days. They had been deployed in Iraq and Libya, but only to safeguard American interests. No one had ever seen them in combat, right up until the day they had been dropped from airplanes, uncrated in warehouses, and unloaded from trucks all along the Af-Pak border—and the American president had announced that no further conflict between the two countries would be permitted. The radical Pakistani government had briefly threatened the use of nuclear weapons before discovering that their nuclear arsenal had been secured by a thousand American robot soldiers.

  Hanif Khan had raged at his CIA handlers and US military contacts, all of whom had held the hard line. Their previous relationship meant nothing. From now on, there would be no need for the warlord and his army to do any work on behalf of the Americans. Nothing would be done in secret from this moment on. With thousands of Tin Men in their arsenal and the global economic cost of war—even the instability caused by the hint of war—the Americans had decided that enforcing stability was the only way to keep the global economy from crumbling.

  The warlord had put his knife into the heart of the CIA man. He had used his army to test the effectiveness of the robots. Only he and his younger brother, Omed, and half a dozen others had escaped with their lives.

  From that day forward, he had a new enemy. Hanif and Omed Khan and the others had spent more than a year fighting a tiny guerilla war against the local platoon of Tin Men. They had captured several of the robots, only to find themselves not with soldiers but with abandoned technology, vacated by the minds of the men and women who piloted them. The first two they imprisoned were destroyed by remote detonation, but Hanif figured out how to prevent that, and soon he and Omed began to learn.

  What they were. How they worked. How to destroy them.

  In time, they hired themselves out to America’s enemies as robot killers. An uneducated regional warlord had become a mercenary whose services were desired by dictators and parliaments in a dozen nations. Several of his men had lost their lives, but he had replaced them with expert killers from around the world. He had Somalis and Bosnians, Russians and Chinese, Egyptians and Germans, a Swede and even an American. Hundreds of Bot Killers working for him in nine robot-occupied hot spots a
round the globe.

  No Pakistanis, though. Fuck those guys. Old enmities died hard.

  At the beginning, Khan had spent every day in the field, frustrated and angry, wishing he could bury his blade in American hearts, never satisfied with crippling or even destroying robot soldiers, knowing that their human pilots went home to soft beds and warm lovers when their shifts were over.

  Then, nine months ago, Omed had been too slow getting off a roof here in Damascus. The Tin Men had chased him down and tried to take him captive. Omed had attacked, turned one of their weapons against them, and been shot to death by two others in a dirty alley. While the Tin Men stood by, waiting for the local authorities to come and remove the body, a dog had pissed on Omed’s corpse.

  The bots who had killed Omed and who had paid no attention to the dog had markings on their shells, as nearly all of the Tin Men did. One had red horns painted on its robot skull and the other bore the number thirteen on its forehead. It had been a simple matter for him to interrogate the locals who frequently communicated with the American bots, to find out the names of the soldiers who were piloting the Devil and Thirteen, the ones who killed Omed—Corporal Wade, female, and Private Kelso, male.

  Hanif Khan had to kill them, of course. Not just destroy their hardware, but murder Wade and Kelso, the Devil and Thirteen. It was a dilemma that had profoundly troubled him, so much that he had insinuated himself in conversations with his various employers—conversations that both they and he had previously considered to be above his station. But they both feared and needed him, and through persistence he soon learned that he was not the only one who sought a more permanent solution to the Americans’ oppression than simply breaking their toys.

  This solution had brought him here today, to this rooftop overlooking the souq, with this sun-baked Dragonov in his hands. He had been away from the fight for a time, but he had not forgotten how to shoot. How to kill. Intimately.

  Exhaling, he picked up his scope and glanced over the edge of the roof, sighting a pair of bots coming his way through the narrow marketplace streets. One of them had diagonal red stripes across its face and the other a bullseye on its abdomen. For a moment, he thought that his luck had gone sour, that the patterns his men had observed had been broken today, but then he noticed the number thirteen on the forehead of the one with the target on its lower torso and he understood. Kelso had new markings.

  A target. Its location was inaccurate, but the irony was not lost on Khan.

  He withdrew, laying down beneath a black covering that would make it harder for anyone monitoring satellite images to notice him. Drazen—the Bosnian assassin who had become his most trusted lieutenant—had wanted to join him for this surveillance but Khan had insisted on being alone. Drazen and the other Bot Killers in Damascus today had other responsibilities.

  A rare smile touched Khan’s lips. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.

  His cell phone vibrated in the shirt pocket that held it tight to his chest. A flutter of excitement went through him and he tamped it down. Emotion could get him killed and then he would not live to see the glory of the day.

  “Yes,” he answered in English, holding the phone to his ear.

  They always spoke English—the only tongue they had in common was the language of their enemies. The man on the other end of the call had a thick, Chinese accent, but the words were clear enough.

  “The countdown has begun.”

  The Watermelon Man had a daughter named Yalda. Nine years old. Whenever Danny went by the fruit market in Damascus he looked for the dark-eyed girl. Though she had grown old enough to be embarrassed when her father said sweet things about her, Yalda had not yet outgrown the childlike wonder that overcame her every time Danny paid a visit. The little girl would pelt him with olives and smear berries on his chassis or study her reflection in the metal alloy of his chest plate. Sick of hearing others call her beautiful, she was clearly trying to decide for herself if the word was warranted.

  Danny never asked the Watermelon Man for anything. He played with Yalda and talked to her father about the weather and the political climate in Syria. The merchant had no hatred for America in his eyes. As long as his daughter was safe, Danny figured the man did not care who provided that safety.

  The bomb that had nearly killed her was hidden in a small truck parked in front of a shop that sold varieties of olive oil. Yalda had a soccer ball Danny had given her after a brief argument about the proper name for the sport—she, of course, called it football. She kicked it around the fruit market, maneuvering through the stalls.

  The explosion blew Yalda through a fruit stand. If not for the splintered wooden shaft that impaled her side, the nine-year-old would have suffered only superficial burns and ugly bruises. Danny and several other members of the platoon were there in less than thirty seconds, converging on the market from their various patrols in the city. Others remained on guard, wary of further attacks because they so often came in groups.

  There had been only one bomb that day. Seven fatalities and Yalda was not among them. Danny had examined her wound, decided that the ticking clock would do more damage than a bit of bouncing around, and had carried her to the nearest surgical team with the inhuman speed that his robot body provided. He had consulted his on-board data systems and determined that it was unlikely any of her organs had been badly damaged and then he had run. PFC Danny Kelso had rolled the dice.

  These days, Yalda studied her reflection in Danny’s chest plate in order to see how much her burns had healed. She enjoyed showing him how they were fading and he always told her that scars made you memorable. But Yalda was nearly ten years old, and he saw in her eyes the hint of knowledge, the hue of sadness. Her face would be telling the story of the bomb for the rest of her life.

  The Watermelon Man would be forever grateful: she was alive. Even so, he had taken her soccer ball away. It had only been singed in the explosion, but she was not allowed to roam so far from her father’s shop anymore.

  From that day forward, if the Watermelon Man learned of a threat to the Tin Men, he found a way to let Danny know. A quiet word about the weather, a recommendation that certain parts of Damascus were to be avoided for a day or two. Danny tried to tell him to stop—the Watermelon Man was risking his life for soldiers who could be destroyed and show up days later in a different robot body—but the man could not ignore the debt he felt he owed.

  All of which meant that Danny didn’t know what to make of the merchant’s absence today. When he and Alaina Torres showed up at the fruit market, at least three quarters of the stalls were empty. Most of the shops were closed up tightly, windows shuttered, only shadows inside. Perhaps a dozen customers browsed the meager offerings in the stalls, old women who frowned disapprovingly as they tested the freshness of melons and pears and wooden boxes full of cherries. A pair of ancient men with wrinkled-leather faces smoked cigarettes in front of an open butcher shop and watched the Tin Men pass by with an air of indifference perfected over long decades.

  “This is fucking spooky,” Torres said, external speaker, not bothering to open a channel.

  Danny scanned the faces and saw many that were familiar, but none that were friendly. As he and Torres had toured their sector, they had seen even fewer signs of life than were on display in the fruit market.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Danny said. “If they were going to nuke Damascus or something, these people wouldn’t have stayed behind.”

  “Nobody’s nuking Damascus,” Torres scoffed. “The only Americans they’d kill would be the embassy folks and the base contingent—a few officers, a lot of techs, and a hundred suits. It’d be ugly, yeah, but these people aren’t going to destroy their own capitol for a hit that small. It’s not nukes, Kelso. We’re missing something.”

  Danny nodded as he studied closed windows and locked up doors. The sensory input system that gave every bot the ability to smell and feel picked up the usual citrus aroma on that narrow street. But beneath
its awnings and umbrellas, the partially deserted market also retained the smell of overripe fruit and the faint odor of old piss. Denuded of most of its customers and merchants and the mountains of fruits and vegetables, it was an unsettling sight.

  They came to the door of the Watermelon Man’s shop and Danny was surprised to find it open. There was an old wooden cart just to the left of the door where the Watermelon Man put his freshest produce each day to attract those who might otherwise keep walking. Today the cart was empty except for a bucket of bruised apples and the stains of days past.

  Tucked under the wheels of the cart, put aside as if its owner had meant to come back to it shortly, was the soccer ball Danny had given to Yalda.

  “I know what’s missing,” he said.

  Torres looked at him.

  “There are no kids,” he said. “There are always kids in the market.”

  Both of them glanced around. Not only were there no children; none of the people in the market that day were under the age of fifty, maybe sixty.

  “Not today,” Torres said.

  He shuddered. With his mind riding inside a bot, he had always felt invulnerable. But whatever the hell was going on in Damascus today, it frightened him.

  “Sit tight,” he said, glancing at Torres. “If you see anything weird, sing out.”

  With her guarding the door, he entered the shop. A bell jangled overhead, but the sound did not disturb the fat man who sat behind the counter. Danny had seen him before and thought he remembered the Watermelon Man introducing him as a cousin or something, though Danny couldn’t remember his name. What he did remember was that the Watermelon Man hated the guy, thought he was a leech and a liar. So why was this guy looking after the shop, even for a minute?

  In the constant heat it was rare to find someone so obese but this man was disgusting. With his thinning white hair and weathered features, Danny pegged him as maybe mid-sixties. His mouth turned down at the edges, as if the thought that he might someday had never occurred to him.